Facebook debuted a new Android app for video producers, with the company detailing its latest tool at the latest iteration of VidCon on Friday. The company used the annual Anaheim, California-based conference to reveal the tool that’s meant to exclusively cater to content creators, according to Facebook Product Director Daniel Danker. Despite its specific focus, the tool wasn’t built from the ground up and was instead presented as a way to complement Facebook Mentions, the company’s standalone app for celebrities, journalists, and other community influencers that have verified Facebook accounts. Danker claims that the app will help content creators make authentic, engaging stories that they’ll be able to easily share with their audiences, with the tool itself offering a robust editing kit for enhancing live broadcasts with intros, outros, and a broad range of special effects, frames, and live stickers for viewers.
While designed as a standalone solution, the app is meant to provide an alternative to Facebook Live-powered streaming by providing producers with more options for adapting their content for their audiences, Danker implied. The service also boasts a Community section meant to connect content creators with their followers on the most popular social media network on the planet, as well as Messenger and Instagram. Apart from more capable editing tools, the solution will also provide users with a significantly more detailed analytics platform that will allow them to analyze their content and viewing habits of their audiences. The end product sounds not unlike YouTube’s broadcasting feature with deeper Facebook integration, though it remains to be seen how the app ends up working in practice, with screenshots beneath this writing suggesting that the service will be a combination of Facebook Live and Facebook Mentions.
The Menlo Park, California-based social media giant said that the upcoming Android app will launch on the Google Play Store later this year but didn’t provide a more specific timeframe to accompany that announcement. It’s understood that the service will also be available on iOS devices and be completely free to use. More details on the platform including its specific name and additional capabilities, as well as Facebook’s other video endeavors should be available shortly.